We report on investigations of the crystallographic structure and the magnetic anisotropies of epitaxial iron films deposited onto periodically stepped Ag(001) surfaces using low energy electron diffraction, x-ray diffraction, second harmonic generation (SHG), as well as the Brillouin light scattering (BLS) technique. The focus of the present study lies on the interrelation between the surface morphology of the buffer layers and the magnetic properties of the Fe films, epitaxially grown onto them. Especially the symmetry breaking at the atomic steps is found to create an uniaxial magnetic anisotropy measured by BLS and a very strong anisotropic signal in magnetic SHG.